Here, this sphere of angels
by miabicicletta
Summary: He'd traced the curve of her jaw with a finger, and her last coherent thought before the chemical stimulant began coursing through her bloodstream was that three years time had not changed Jim Moriarty. If anything, his madness had only deepened.


Her hands have stopped shaking. She twists at the fixture and from the shower head the resulting spray of hot water is like a blessing. The relief of it is immeasurable, immediate. The tiled bath is cold, and when the scalding water meets the ambient air, a rising stream suffuses the room with warm little clouds that bear the trace scent of his cologne.

A soothing smell. Molly breathes deeply. Sherlock once told her that olfactory sensations are those most powerfully linked to memory. By that logic, it naturally follows that any aroma suggesting of Sherlock Holmes should hardly be of comfort. She takes another deep breath, steadies herself against the tile. Logic, she suspects, has very little to do with it.

She aches everywhere, her muscles sore with some bitter cocktail of adrenaline, lactic acid and trace remnants of impure MDMA.

"It's called _molly_." And how he'd had laughed at that. A low, demented, insistent giggle that made her instinctively edge away from him as much as the zip ties binding her would allow. "I've left some for him, too. Think he'll get it, pet? My little _clue_?" He'd traced the curve of her jaw with a finger, and her last coherent thought before the chemical stimulant began coursing through her bloodstream was that three years time had not changed Jim Moriarty. If anything, his madness had only deepened.

She scrubs at the bits of dirt and ash and blood under her nails. She will never begin to understand what makes Sherlock Holmes crave the high. Perhaps cocaine is different. Maybe it does not leave him sprawling across some shapeless morass of time, lost in a neurochemical haze, unable to discern reality from not. Perhaps minutes do not pass like hours, hours as days, and every second bright with terror.

The water courses smoothly down her head; a strange sensation. Her hair is gone. What few spotty patches remain are testament to his haste. She screws her eyes shut, fingers scrabbling against the grout as Jim's mad voice warbles twisted insults from the far side of death. Molly splashes her face, grits her teeth. Tomorrow she will do the autopsy. Mike will fight her on it – on her coming in at all – but she'll argue back, and he will cave to her, as ever. She wants to make sure Jim stays dead this time. The men in her life seem to have trouble with that.

The water sluices down her body. Vivid crimson Mandelbrot sets eddy around her feet as blood washes from her skin, spiraling out and down the drain. The garish pink ceramic leaves her faintly ill, like she's in the belly of some huge beast. The thought is at once hilarious and not at all funny. She can't stop the sudden rise of laughter, high and hysterical; panicked.

The indistinct murmur of voices in the other room stops. There's a knock, and Mary is at the door. "Molly?"

She presses her wet fingers against her mouth, stifles the outburst. The water falls; the feeling quells. She takes a breath of the warm, aromatic air. She is safe, she is alive. Her friends are safe and alive. It is over.

Molly turns off the water. "Alright," she says to herself as much as Mary, and pulls herself together. "I'm alright."

It began with the pills, scattered across the floor of Molly Hooper's empty Islington flat. _I. O. U._ Not long after, the phone call:

"Did you miss me!" He cackled. Then, deadly serious. "You've been _a liar_, my dear. You didn't win the game. You can't win the game if you cheat."

"Didn't you?"

"Left you a present, Sherlock," Jim Moriarty taunted.

"I wasn't overly fond of the last few."

"Think you'll like this one. Wasn't on the _agenda_ so to speak, but Little Miss Mouse wasn't playing by the ru-u-ules. Needed some reminding."

"Where is she?"

"She's a silly thing, isn't she? Prim, prissy perfection. All the way down to the long, loooooong cut of her hair. Oh, I just love it. Doesn't she just seem so sweet? So _innocent_? Not much like you, is she? Maybe that's why you like her, your pathologist. It is just so _adorable_, though. Another pet to play with!"

John interrupts. "I've never understood the whole nursery rhyme, fairy tale thing."

Sherlock Holmes opens his eyes, unfolds his fingers. He has not slept in six days. Not since Molly Hooper vanished had into thin air. He feels raw, sapped of strength, his abilities stretched out too great across too much time. Nerves ragged, frayed. In truth, Sherlock cannot recall a more arduous, more demanding, more draining ordeal.

"He liked them," Sherlock shrugs. "Childhood association, probably. Certainly the twists on them suggest a rejection of traditional Western morality. I don't know. Maybe he just liked the grandeur."

"Scary tales, more like," John says.

From the loo, there is a high, horrible hiccuping laugh. All three of them turn to the source.

There's a hard set to Mary's jaw when she turns to her husband. "Best time for puns, you think?"

John tips his head, contrite. "Nope, probably not." She goes to check on Molly, knocking at the door.

Sherlock is grateful for Mary. For her calm, and her nerves of steel. He had not been able to open the box with its red bow – Moriarty's present. He had arrived at Baker Street to find it laid out on his table. Laptop sized, 22-27 centimeters in depth. It had not been a large package. Capable of holding something small. Or – he stiffened at the thought, unable to move toward it – a part of something small. He was frozen by the fear of its infinite possibilities. Of what it might contain. [Pandora: evils of the world.] [Schrodinger: quantum entanglement; cat plus poison; dead and alive at once.]

His hand had shaken badly.

"It's okay, Sherlock," Mary said. "I'll do it." John had watched, looking ill, and had gripped his elbow very hard, bracing him.

Mary hesitated for only a fraction of a second before reaching for the lid, lifting it toward them, obscuring the contents from their view. She had expected the worst, then. She did not want them to see. Sherlock closed his eyes.

In his mind, he addressed the worst possible scenarios. He imagined her head, her eyes, her heart, and for each possible outcome he devised a counter-punishment in greater than equal measure to her suffering. It was a long list. He was thorough.

Mary exhaled in relief. As she did, Sherlock opened his eyes and let out some measure of breath he had not known he'd been holding. In silence she reached in with a set of tongs and removed the contents. Despite his abating sense of dread, a pure, cold note of fear had run through him at the sight.

Molly's long, dark ponytail, tied off with a thin red ribbon, the base still matted darkly together.

The limp and lifeless arc of her hair haunted him, fueled him through days and nights of furious, panicked analysis, leading him eventually – _finally!_ – to an abandoned industrial park on the outskirts of London, the lots divided by a barbed wire maze. He knew the monster awaiting him at its center.

Even Moriarty's cold voice could not dispel the lifting sense of lightness he felt to see Molly was still alive. The vision she presented, however, was jarring; far removed from the sunny, white-coated pathologist he was accustomed to seeing at Barts. Her head was bare, and she wore a dark, diaphanous indigo dress that hung from her shoulders like a shroud, the color like bruising against her pale skin. Her bare feet left bloody footprints in her path. She looked like some ancient goddess, all skull and bones, capable of exacting her own rough justice for the calculated cruelties of the world. She was wild, austere, terrible. He half expected her to play a lute of bone, or wear men's heads on a rope around her neck. Sherlock narrowed the wide and powerful universe of his focus to Jim Moriarty. He wanted to give her one.

There was, as always, a dance:

Moriarty's eyes sparkled. "Do you remember? What I said that magical night by the pool, under the stars?"

"Of course."

"I'm a bit disappointed. You made it terribly easy. I never expected you to be so _conventional_. Didn't think you were that sort of man. Friends and family, and all that."

"More like you?"

Moriarty's eyes flashed. "Oh, but I'm not a man. Isn't that what you told them all, hmm? I'm not a man. I'm a spider! Crawling in the shadows, snagging pretty little flies in my web."

He crept around Molly, dragging a finger across her throat. "But, you were wrong, you see. I'm bigger. More powerful than that." His eyes went wide, giddy with wrath.

"I am a force of nature," Jim Moriarty said. "I am the wind that bends the world down. I will _drown_ it in pain." He repeated his old threat, the words spoken by the poolside where little Jim came into his own. "I will burn –_burn!_ –the heart out of you," he bit his lip and shrugged. "It's the only way, I'm afraid. The only way. I am deaaaath and he is me and we are _you_, Sherlock Holmes. No heroes this time. No _help_, this time," he hissed, a black, furious look upon his face as his grip on Molly tightened. He kissed her cheek. She recoiled and bared her teeth at him. "Just. Us. Dragons."

Sherlock had smiled. A cold smile, without humor or mercy. "Oh, but I told you. I'm not a hero. But I have always wanted to slay a dragon."

There was, as always, a dance.

Now, the indigo dress lay in damp, tatty rags on the floor. Mary balls it in heap, tossing it into the fireplace. John strikes a match and they all watch as it burns.

"We should go," Mary says.

"_Thank you_," Molly says, hugging them both very tight. John pauses in the doorway while Mary and Molly embrace. He takes Sherlock's elbow, as he had days earlier, in the midst of the crisis. He dips his chin, exactly once, glances at Molly, then leans in to point a finger at Sherlock's chest. _I know,_ John seems to say. _I know_. He takes Mary's hand. They leave Baker Street to both its better, and its lesser, angels.

Molly wanders across the room in his red dressing gown and pyjamas Mary has given her. In the firelight, she appears fragile and aimless. Only when she catches her reflection in the mirror – a startled look; a half second without recognition, one hand half-raised in the air, bracing herself against the image she presents herself – does she return with purpose to the bathroom.

He leans against the jamb. Under the hard brightness, her face is pale, revealing the fine details of her skull with a harsh, clinical sterility. The skin is scored in a half-dozen places; across a cheekbone, behind one ear, along her neck. Her eyes – bloodshot, exhausted – take in the scrapes, the ridgy-rises of copper-brown where a blade razed too close, too deep. A few patchy stripes of brown hair are all that remains of her once long, shiny locks.

"Right," she says, exhaling, steeling herself. Water runs from the tap. Sherlock watches as she scrapes his razor along the convex plane of her scalp, undoing the last of the hack job.

He imagined it would leave her looking infinitely more vulnerable. That it would make her seem doll-like, or broken in some indistinguishable, vaguely ill and chemical way. But her eyes flash defiantly, and she rebuts his preconceptions with a clenched jaw, back straight. Her hands do not shake; her intention does not waver. As though for every light-brown fiber taken from her head, she was imbued with something of much greater substance and durability. The strength of her is titanic. She takes up so much space. More than he thought possible.

It seems fitting, then, the enormity of his remorse. The responsibility he feels for her ordeal, for her suffering. He is stricken by it, wounded in some place beyond the reach of assassins or bullets, and yet far more vulnerable than any scrap of skin and bone.

It is an orphan feeling, this raw, saturated emotion. Unrelated even to that which he'd felt when the lives of his friends had been threatened before the fall. But he had not felt anything akin to this before, not even for John, who, in the face of great danger could rely upon his training as a soldier (and, more recently, a spouse possessing a uniquely advantageous skill set in his line of work). At Lestrade's command was ever a small army of law enforcement specialists, whose dimwittedness was tolerably balanced out by the fact that they were regularly armed. Even batty Mrs. Hudson with her murderous ex-husband, had known what she was getting in for, letting him stay at Baker Street these years.

Molly…

_Molly_, Sherlock thinks, and finds himself almost desperate. The need to be near her is overwhelming.

"Always wondered if I could pull off a pixie," she says, idly, pursing her lips. She glances up in the mirror, meeting his eye. "Was never brave enough to try it."

"You're braver than you know, Molly Hooper," he says. He takes a cloth, running it up the back of her neck, along the sloping parietal curve, wipes the last of the soap foam from her head. He tosses it aside, into the bath, turning her around to face him.

She is delicate in his arms, like a basket of reeds bobbing on water. Ripples play out across his skin, waves of emotion he cannot name. His lays his palm against the delicate curvature of her skull, fitting her head neatly in the space below his chin. He cups her jaw in his hands, lays a gentle kiss to the top of her bare head.

Molly presses her face into his shoulder, sniffles once, and exhales. Her shoulders slump against him, the stiffly-held constriction releasing from her frame. Her arms slide around his torso, slim fingers tilling across the fabric of his shirt, and below, his skin. The tactile sensation triggers a cache of geophysical information: glaciers; ice floes; lateral moraines. His mind chips at some monolithic notion that he can't quite see. It's right before him, but the perspective is inconvenient. He can't discern the shape, the meaning of it. He's too close. Something large, looming. Tectonic. It's time and pressure; geographic identity; change. Subtle shifts over long years; Cordilleran advance, and halt, and retreat; slowly now, a new-made landscape.

She slips from his embrace, pads to his bedroom, glances at him from the door. In the dim light, her eyes shine, so large and luminous.

She knows she's still in shock, to some degree. That without a doubt, there will be nightmares and emotional fallout that will not be easy to maneuver. But, she also feels in a way that is as imprecise as it is undeniable that she is different. Stronger. As though some part of her _was_ caught in Jim Moriarty's terrible dragonfire and refined by the intense, awful heat of it. Sherlock had come through that same fire for her. Through thorns and darkness and slayed a dragon.

She says his name. The way he steps in to her, instantly, and so close, it feels like magic: An incantation that has stripped him of all his masks, all his posturing. His has set down his shields, leaving his heart bare. Sherlock has never looked more vulnerable than in the moment before he kisses her.

His mouth brushes hers with such care, such caution. She runs her fingers through his hair – deciding that she doesn't mind he won't be able to reciprocate for oh, well, a long while, anyway, just as long as she's still able to thread her fingers those damnable curls. She slides her lips over his, powerfully aware of a sudden, needful desire blooming in her.

They are both breathing heavily, her back pressed against the closed door, when they break.

He pulls back, swallows, not quite meeting her eye. "I should tell you that I have not –"

"I know," Molly says. The corded muscles of his trapezius tense and relax. She is so used to the cold, listless anonymity of the dead. Under her palms, he is warm, full-blooded. Potential with energy.

"You do?" A question.

"I do." Under her palm the heat of him radiates through layers of bone, sinew, fabric and still pours into her. She is almost dizzy. He is hesitant. Afraid? No, not afraid. Only nervous. Uncertain. It's this realization that steadies her, keeps her tethered in the moment. She pushes him back so he's seated at the edge of the bed, bends one knee against his thigh. He swallows.

"Just me, Sherlock," she says, his head in her hands. Her thumbs ghost the rounded edges of his jaw, wandering patterns across his skin. _This face_. The face that has haunted her for more years than she cares to admit. One she has smacked and kissed and lusted for and hated, hated, _hated_ some days.

(She never hated him. But, oh, times, how she wanted to.)

She traces the rising planar ridge of the supraorbital foramen; his eyebrows are so soft. "Just me."

"You," he says, hoarse, "are never 'just.'"

One night, not long after he had returned from his two-year absence, Molly sent him a message. She had worried about him, then – ensconced back in his flat, alone in the world that had gone on without him. However much he claimed to reject sentiment, those years out in the cold had changed him. On the surface he seemed happier, but she saw that he was sadder, too. How he gleamed, but threw such long shadows.

She was on the Tube, heading home after a long shift on some unremarkable weeknight, when she came across a poem in the pages of a crinkled, days-old, staff-room copy of the _Sunday Guardian_. It had a particular quality of sadness made her think of Sherlock as she read it, and her heart went out to him as she did. Without dwelling much on the notion, she texted him one couplet, knowing he wouldn't care, or would think it foolishly emotional. If he read it at all.

**Darwin, writing in his garden, remembers the sea  
like some sleep he feared he'd never wake from.**

She just wanted him to know, to remember, really, that she was here. Once home, she phoned her fiancè and went to bed, and wasn't at all surprised when Sherlock did not reply. And he didn't, at least, not right away. But there were two messages waiting on her screen when she woke up the next morning.

**Ithaka gave you the beautiful journey.  
Without her you would not have set out. **

Then, time stamped a minute later,

**She has nothing left to give you now.**

She had stared at the words, flummoxed. Poetry wasn't something Sherlock Holmes _did_, she was sure. She'd only wanted him to know she was thinking of him, if he needed to talk, because she could tell he was hurting, just as he had been before he left...

The lines he'd sent stayed on her mind all morning, especially once she read the whole of the text he'd quoted as she waited for a Northern Line train on the platform at Angel. _Ithaca_. It was a metaphor wrapped in the legend of Odysseus. A call to live one's life as full as possible – earn wisdom and truth, have adventure, experience pleasure. The carriage (car, _car_) rattled on.

She was lost in thought as she changed at Moorgate, but rather than taking the Circle to Barbican, and Barts, as she so often did, she exited the station and began to walk. Reaching back, she recalled the story of Odysseus and Penelope, and the long years the wise king spent far from home, waging other men's wars, roped into a perilous journey, and all the while fighting to return home to his city, his birthright, his queen.

Molly had stared, blindly, and wondered if…No. In the cold light of winter morning, she was certain she was reading into it too much. Some last, futile gasps of her long-ago crush. Though, she admitted, perhaps, if she had seen it earlier, in the moment after he had sent it, she might have done something. In some late hour, long before dawn, alone in her bed and reading his sadness...She might have–

But no. She had not. She pushed the matter from her mind irritated with herself and her fixating. The habit was hard to break. It was no different from his nicotine, and no matter the effort that went in, she could never fully slake her need for it. Once an addict, and all. An ugly metaphor.

Sherlock touches her with sculptor's hands – hands that study as they move. They learn her in ways that she, inhabiting this small, imperfect form, cannot comprehend. In another time, he would have been an artist, she is certain. Some extraordinary and eccentric polymath compelled by a divine, terrible sense of purpose, consumed by desire for the raw, indiscrete secrets of the natural world. Driven by that violent perpetual-motion mind, turning over and over, roiling mad, mad, mad like the heart of an unknowable sun. It is not hard to imagine. Those hands; that mind. They could make such beautiful things.

His fingers skirt beneath the t-shirt Mary had lent her, across the bare skin of her waist, her abdomen, her flank, pulling her to him. She straddles his lap, liking the authority of it, of him leaning up to her, his pose asking a question to which she is the answer. He seeks her, as she had sought him for so long, and that plain, unadorned fact, the pure, momentous truth of it stills her with an astonishing sense of grace. A single tear slips from under her lashes.

Lifted and guided, wrenched outright, their layers vanish until there is nothing between them. There is only the last, longest distance to cross. His lips graze her neck, hovering just about her pulse point, the ghost of a kiss. She knits her hands in his hair and leans in, kisses him hungrily. If Sherlock finds the bareness of her head as off-putting, as visceral or revealing and _awful_ as she does, he gives no indication, only pulls her closer, considering her with a luminous intensity she has never, not once, encountered from anyone else.

Under his gaze and his hands, his lips – a breath; oh, _finally, oh_ –

Those fathomless eyes meet her own, as open to her as his heart.

- _him_.

He stands on some precipice, watching. Great, transformative forces are at work, collapsing, crashing huge, high layers of ice and rock. Something warm and bright and bursting has snuck in, come from below, slipping through the smallest of cracks and crevices over time, bubbling up, rising like a secret. Beside him, Molly grins, her hair fluttering around her face in growing sunlight. She smiles, laughs, takes his hand.

She kisses his face, his cheek and mouth, tender and sweet and wanting. His mind spins over and over under her touch, terrified, wild, enthralled. The sheer _power_ of her is utterly destructive to the lifetime of barriers he has built.

Molly does not demure, does not hesitate. She guides him true. Always. _Always._

His hands smooth along the crest of her shoulder blade, the soft plane of her belly. The rush is thunderous. Meltwater pours off him. His skin grows slick and hot, as does hers. The salt-bright tang lingers on his tongue. She hollows him out, reaches in and finds the icy heart of him, envelopes him, volcanic and brilliant.

Sherlock nips at her mouth, forces the tedious metaphor aside; he has no desire to explore the (now dramatically altered, apparently) recesses of his mind palace tonight. Not now.

She is pliant, and teasing, gentle and not. She makes sounds that resolve in rich, throaty groans. She smiles. He relaxes, moving with her movement, and memorizes this moment for always. He almost never had this. She almost did not –

He pulls her close, shifts their positions, asserting some base, mammalian desire for the dominant role, demanding the more demonstrative, protective stance. She does not protest, fitting her body to his as with biological certainty. She cries out, clutching at him. He tears her name from the short, grasping breath at his throat, overcome and undone. "_Molly_," he manages, holding her eyes. She kisses his temple, makes low, soothing sounds.

"I know," she whispers, her hand against his cheek.

"He hurt you." An apology; an agony; a promise.

"Sherlock," she says, her lips against his, her hands cradling his face. "It wasn't me he was trying to hurt."

He lay his head down, pressing his cheek to her skin, feeling the rise and fall of her chest, the catch of breath in her lungs, the thin prominence of her collarbone. He feels rarified. Released.

The leaden grip of uncertain emotions lifts as he breathes deeply and the listens to the dull thunder of her heart. He mentally calculates her heart rate (130 bpm; above normal; slowing); catalogues the dips and contours of her bare head (a stark, strange look, to be sure, but not the unsightly horror she finds it) beneath his fingertips. The smell of soap lingers below sweat and the low, sweet-sour, heady scent of arousal. Sensory input rushes in, filling him with sensation, with her, with them. His mind churns, invigorated, laser-sharp and honed.

She splays her fingers across the base of his skull, cards them through his damp hair. He smiles into her skin, feeling a lightness, a lifting that he has rarely encountered in his life. Once, most prominently, in the time after his long extended absence while John had still been angry with him, when he had just barely succeeded in saving his best friend from Magnussen's flames.

In absolution Sherlock Holmes has earned the company of the angels he keeps. And in this, the attenuated clarity of his joy, one in particular has shown him the most certain, most singular, of truths.

And though Molly knew the words first, it is Sherlock, surprising no one more than himself, who is first to speak them aloud.

End Notes

The poems Molly references are Ithaca by Constantine Cavafy, and Half-Ourselves & Half-Not by Colin Cheney. Title comes from the second one.

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